POPE said that STEELE, though he led a careless and vicious life, had
nevertheless a love and reverence for virtue. The life of Steele was
not that of a retired scholar; hence his moral character becomes more
instructive. He was one of those whose hearts are the dupes of their
imaginations, and who are hurried through life by the most despotic
volition. He always preferred his caprices to his interests; or,
according to his own notion, very ingenious, but not a little absurd,
"he was always of the humour of preferring the state of his mind to
that of his fortune." The result of this principle of moral conduct
was, that a man of the most admirable abilities was perpetually acting
like a fool, and, with a warm attachment to virtue, was the frailest
of human beings.
In the first act of his life we find the seed that developed itself in
the succeeding ones. His uncle could not endure a hero for his heir:
but Steele had seen a marching regiment; a sufficient reason with him
to enlist as a private in the horse-guards: cocking his hat, and
putting on a broad-sword, jack-boots, and shoulder-belt, with the most
generous feelings he forfeited a very good estate.--At length Ensign
Steele's frank temper and wit conciliated esteem, and extorted
admiration, and the ensign became a favourite leader in all the
dissipations of the town. All these were the ebullitions of genius,
which had not yet received a legitimate direction. Amid these orgies,
however, it was often pensive, and forming itself; for it was in the
height of these irregularities that Steele composed his "Christian
Hero," a moral and religious treatise, which the contritions of every
morning dictated, and to which the disorders of every evening added
another penitential page. Perhaps the genius of Steele was never so
ardent and so pure as at this period; and in his elegant letter to his
commander, the celebrated Lord Cutts, he gives an interesting account
of the origin of this production, which none but one deeply imbued
with its feelings could have so forcibly described.
"_Tower Guard, March 23, 1701._
"MY LORD,--The address of the following papers is so very much due
to your lordship, that they are but a mere report of what has
passed upon my guard to my commander; for they were writ upon
duty, when the mind was perfectly disengaged, and at leisure, in
the silent watch of the night, to run over the busy dream of the
day; and the vigilance which obliges us to suppose an enemy always
near us, has awakened a sense that there is a restless and subtle
one which constantly attends our steps, and meditates our
ruin."[120]
To this solemn and monitory work he prefixed his name, from this
honourable motive, that it might serve as "a standing testimony
against himself, and make him ashamed of understanding, and seeming to
feel what was virtuous, and living so quite contrary a life." Do we
not think that no one less than a saint is speaking to us? And yet he
is still nothing more than Ensign Steele! He tells us that this grave
work made him considered, who had been no undelightful companion, as a
disagreeable fellow--and "The Christian Hero," by his own words,
appears to have fought off several fool-hardy geniuses who were for
"trying their valour on him," supposing a saint was necessarily a
poltroon. Thus "The Christian Hero," finding himself slighted by his
loose companions, sat down and composed a most laughable comedy, "The
Funeral;" and with all the frankness of a man who cares not to hide
his motives, he tells us, that after his religious work he wrote the
comedy because "nothing can make the town so fond of a man as a
successful play."[121] The historian who had to record such strange
events, following close on each other, as an author publishing a book
of piety, and then a farce, could never have discovered the secret
motive of the versatile writer, had not that writer possessed the most
honest frankness.
Steele was now at once a man of the town and its censor, and wrote
lively essays on the follies of the day in an enormous black peruke
which cost him fifty guineas! He built an elegant villa, but, as he
was always inculcating economy, he dates from "The Hovel." He detected
the fallacy of the South Sea scheme, while he himself invented
projects, neither inferior in magnificence nor in misery. He even
turned alchemist, and wanted to coin gold, merely to distribute it.
The most striking incident in the life of this man of volition, was
his sudden marriage with a young lady who attended his first wife's
funeral--struck by her angelical beauty, if we trust to his raptures.
Yet this sage, who would have written so well on the choice of a wife,
united himself to a character the most uncongenial to his own; cold,
reserved, and most anxiously prudent in her attention to money, she
was of a temper which every day grew worse by the perpetual imprudence
and thoughtlessness of his own. He calls her "Prue" in fondness and
reproach; she was Prudery itself! His adoration was permanent, and so
were his complaints; and they never parted but with bickerings--yet he
could not suffer her absence, for he was writing to her three or four
passionate notes in a day, which are dated from his office, or his
bookseller's, or from some friend's house--he has risen in the midst
of dinner to despatch a line to "Prue," to assure her of his affection
since noon.[122]--Her presence or her absence was equally painful to
him.
Yet Steele, gifted at all times with the susceptibility of genius, was
exercising the finest feelings of the heart; the same generosity of
temper which deluded his judgment, and invigorated his passions,
rendered him a tender and pathetic dramatist; a most fertile essayist;
a patriot without private views; an enemy whose resentment died away
in raillery; and a friend, who could warmly press the hand that
chastised him. Whether in administration, or expelled the House;
whether affluent, or flying from his creditors; in the fulness of his
heart he, perhaps, secured his own happiness, and lived on, like some
wits, extempore. But such men, with all their virtues and all their
genius, live only for themselves.
Steele, in the waste of his splendid talents, had raised sudden
enmities and transient friendships. The world uses such men as Eastern
travellers do fountains; they drink their waters, and when their
thirst is appeased, turn their hacks on them. Steele lived to be
forgotten. He opened his career with folly; he hurried through it in a
tumult of existence; and he closed it by an involuntary exile, amid
the wrecks of his fortune and his mind.
Steele, in one of his numerous periodical works, the twelfth number of
the "Theatre," has drawn an exquisite contrast between himself and
his friend Addison: it is a cabinet picture. Steele's careful pieces,
when warm with his subject, had a higher spirit, a richer flavour,
than the equable softness of Addison, who is only beautiful.
"There never was a more strict friendship than between these
gentlemen; nor had they ever any difference but what proceeded from
their different way of pursuing the same thing: the one, with
patience, foresight, and temperate address, always waited and stemmed
the torrent; while the other often plunged himself into it, and was as
often taken out by the temper of him who stood weeping on the bank for
his safety, whom he could not dissuade from leaping into it. Thus
these two men lived for some years last past, shunning each other, but
still preserving the most passionate concern for their mutual welfare.
But when they met, they were as unreserved as boys; and talked of the
greatest affairs, upon which they saw where they differed, without
pressing (what they knew impossible) to convert each other."
If Steele had the honour of the invention of those periodical papers
which first enlightened the national genius by their popular
instruction, he is himself a remarkable example of the moral and the
literary character perpetually contending in the man of volition.